YULC for exact music synchronisation via MIDI

Hi everyone, I want to share with you this beautiful usage of YULC, by Andre and his band!

 

Hi, my name is Andre and I am the singer and guitarist of the german band "Nerds on Fire" located in Berlin.

We are playing rock-music with backing-tracks. That means that synth-sounds and effects are coming from a sequencer. The audio from the sequencer contains a click-track that is going directly to our in-ear-monitors and the synth-sounds and sound-effects are routed to the audience along with the rest of the instruments. This is a quite normal setup, that many bands are using to perform rock-music with synth-sounds and effects.

This setup leads to the fact that every song is perfectly predefined and there is no improvisation in regard to the song-structure.

This offers the opportunity to add some automation to the performance. If the sequencer is able to send midi-data along with the audio then it is possible to control other devices in sync to the music.

That way I automated my e-guitar pedalboard (Line 6 HELIX LT) to automatically switch the presets if the corresponding midi-signal arrives.

I am doing that with the great CME WIDI MASTER to connect the midi devices (in this case the sequencer Cymatic LP-16 Live Player and the effect pedalboard) wireless via bluetooth BLE.

But that was not enough for me 😊 What if I could add some LEDs onto my guitar?

It was late 2019… I had some ws2812b LED-stripes at home and played a bit around with an Arduino. I checked out FastLED, CLED, Neomatrix LED and other LED-libraries. WLED was not around at that time as far as I know.

I decided to make an LED-board that could be put onto my guitar. 

Here is a little foto-lovestory how it all started ...

 

 

 

Version 1 was a real mess :o

 

Version 2 was already better

 

That was really a lot of work! But in the end I made it and it is awesome! I managed to build my own software around the libraries I mentioned above. I had my controller-prototype on a Teensy 2. I took all the electricity-parts out of my guitar (potentiometers) and put my prototype inside the guitar and a midi-connector on the outside.

That worked great and the LED-board was a great Effect. It can display 2d-matrix stuff like scrolltext but also 1d-LED-stripe-effects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO8DFP8WDsA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKjd0I2Ja88

But I had a bit of a problem because I made that LED-board for the worst of my guitars and every guitar has a different shape. Another issue is that the LEDs are emitting some noise into the pickups… so the LEDs shouldn’t be too close to the pickups … in the end you can not avoid this noise completely.

I bought a better guitar and I wanted at least two guitars on stage with LEDs to be able to change the guitar when a string breaks. But I didnt want to cut out the electricity of my new and expensive guitar. I wanted a more non-destructive LED-setup 😉

So I decided to go back to a simple LED-stripe that is around the complete guitar. I tried that and it worked well. No more 2d-matrix stuff ☹ … butt still a very cool effect. So I decided to put that on two of my guitars.

And I also needed a final solution for the electronics. A better controller (Teensy 4.0 instead of Teensy 2) would also be great. So I designed a circuit board and printed it in china. It was relatively simple and had a Teensy 4.0, a buck regulator and some components to decode midi on board. But it was the first time i made a circuit board … and i am still proud i made it 😉

 

 

My father printed a case for my guitar strap with his 3d printer and this was nearly perfect. I had great and simple LED-effects without cutting out the electronics of my guitars.

Version 3 was somewhat perfect and used on stage

 

You can see me performing with this setup here:

https://www.youtube.com/@nerdsonfire8649

 

But that still wasn’t perfect. Sometimes the teensy crashed when there was too much load on the LEDs. After investigation it was clear that the buck regulator couldn’t handle higher power consumption. So I always had to turn the LEDs relatively dark.

I planned to make a v2.0 of my LED-Board with a better power supply.

But then ….

… a friend of mine send me a link to an article about the YULC and I was instantly on fire! That YULC-board looked awesome professional and had nearly everything my board was lacking …. and i wouldn’t have to solder so much! But the YULC wasnt available at that time. Shortly after it was launched I ordered my first YULC to try out if my code would run on that board.

I didn’t have to change so much …. the code was running good although the ESP32 is slower than the teensy 4.0. The only thing missing was midi. And I thought I couldn’t use ESP32 bluetooth BLE because I had to connect to the widi master and that side is a proprietary architecture (that is still worth a try I guess). So I bought the CME WIDI CORE. That is the widi master but as a naked version on a developer board. PERFECT! 

Now I have a very powerful board with a perfect power supply and the Bluetooth midi-solution was easy to implement. I added a rotary encoder to be able to adjust the LED brightness on the fly.

 

 

The next TODO is to print a new case!

So the hardware looks like this:

• a 3d-printed case
• a 12v LIPO battery (2.200 mAh) connected via on/off-switch
• YULC with fan
• CME WIDI Core connected to RX port on the YULC
• Rotary Encoder to adjust brightness connected to digital ports on the YULC
• Voltage divider directly after the LIPO and connected to the YULC to measure voltage

On the musical side:

• midi-track is part of the songfile on the sequencer (cymatic LP16 live player)
• Bluetooth midi transmitter (cme widi master) is connected to the sequencer

On the software-side:

• My program on the yulc detects the midi signal and starts the song that is assigned to that midi signal.
• The yulc controls the LED lightshow exactly in milliseconds to be in sync with the song.
• It is also possible to send a midi-signal each time a song part changes
• but i simply start a song once at the beginning and all the rest is exact timing inside yulc.

 

Best part is that i have in each song some special LEDs that show me the right chord positions of that song. That makes my life easier in darkness 

If the LIPO voltage ist too low, the LEDs are automatically switched off but with a long-press on the rotary encoder i can bypass that if i want to.

Right now i dont need the wifi module. It would be perfect if i could use the onboard BT BLE to connect to the widi master but that will be another story.

And still another todo is to sync my other lights to our performance…but that is a real challenge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8DSNBX6gFA

It was a 5-year-journey of trying and learning … a great journey and all eyes are always on my guitar 😊

I published a simplified version of my source-code on github:

https://github.com/just4phil/SIMPLE-LED-GIT_on_YULC

 

Thanks to Alessandro for making the YULC!!!

 

bye

Andre